You Make Me Do Too Much Labor

He could hardly use his limbs for a time, let alone rule the Seven Kingdoms, so Maekar relieved his brother of his duties. You did not return to your home in King’s Landing when you left Ashford. Instead, you made a new one in Sunspear, on a piece of far-off farmland, not far from where his mother grew up in Dorne. The warmth and the golden yellow sun brought the color back to his face, and made Baelor nostalgic for a time he can no longer remember now.

“Tell me again,” the man says with his head tipped back. He looks up at you as you stand beside his chair, raking the thin blade down the length of his neck. Heavy soap cakes onto the white cloth around his neck, along with the fine scruff you shave off his pale skin.

“I’ve already told you a thousand times,” you laugh. “I think I could recite the Dance of the Dragons better than most maesters at this point.”

The sound of your pretty giggling mixes with that of the rolling waves from the bright blue sea about a furlong away from the porch, and the distant bleating of goats being shooed away from the grape vineyard a mile or so up the hill. Everything smells like sea salt and citrus and soap and you.

Baelor knows he has a hard time remembering his home back in King’s Landing, but he can’t understand why he should care about anything other than the one he shares with you now.

“I should know it, I know…” Baelor hums in a soft voice that borders on melancholic.

He smiles softly to himself as his mismatched eyes dart over your face — memorizing the shape of your eyes, the curve of your nose, and the dip in your cupid’s bow — lest the merciless Gods take that memory away from him, too. He fights back a shiver while you sculpt his greying beard with a blade in your expert hand, taking care of him like you were made to do it, though he struggles to recall why.

“I just… I don’t understand why I don’t remember…” he confesses quietly.

You smile through the pang of grief in your chest and repeat the reminder you have to tell him most days. “Because you got hurt, my love. And the maester said it affected your memory.”

“I got hurt…” Baelor echoes, not quite a question, but not quite a firm statement either.

“Yes,” you nod, smoothing the edge of the blade down the milky white tendons of his neck. “You were defending Ser Duncan’s honor at the trial of seven—”

“Trial of seven?” the older man repeats with a furrow to his dark brows. “There hasn’t been one of those in over a century.”

The statement of fact makes you perk.

“Do you remember the last one?” you press gently, parting from his side to wash the blade off in the basin of warm water beside you.

Baelor thinks for a moment, blue-brown irises tracing the fluffy white clouds overhead as he fights to recall a deeply held memory. “It was… Maegor the Cruel,” he mumbles some moments later. “And Ser Damon from House Morrigen— They called him Damon the Devout…”

He turns his head to the side to flash you a soft smile, full of a quiet pride, as if he himself were shocked at having remembered. You meet his sheepish grin with a wider beam, “Aye, my love,” you nod as you return to his side, brushing the blade gently over his jaw. “That’s right.”

“Pity…” he hums in a monotone, folding his weathered hands across his stomach. “I can remember every battle recorded in the citadel, but not my own…”

“Ser Duncan was accused of hurting Aerion, your nephew, who opted for a trial of seven rather than trial by combat,” you explain, soft eyes flitting from Baelor’s attentive gaze to where you shape the edges of his grey beard. “And when Ser Duncan couldn’t find seven fighters, you stood up for him — like a true knight. And you fought gallantly—”

Baelor makes a noise of protest in the back of his throat.

“A gallant knight would remember fighting gallantly,” he protests. “And I can hardly remember what happened to me.”

“Perhaps it’s best you don’t,” you murmur warmly and turn away. “It was a brutal fight.”

Baelor’s soft voice follows you the short distance to the basin, where you drop the blade and rinse your hands. “Tell me,” he says with an audible, sad sort of smile in his voice. “Of how gallantly I fought, I mean.”

Even with your back facing him, he can see the way your shoulders tense, as if his simple plea were enough to take your breath away.

You swallow hard and fight back the distant nausea that always accompanies the bitter memories. You blink, and suddenly the basin of soapy water becomes bright crimson blood — and the white suds turn into the shards of Baelor’s bone and brain, from where you’d cradled his wound to keep his skull from falling apart. Even now, the scent of a salty sea and dewy grass washes away to the stench of copper you’d smelled in the barracks that day — when the blood was so thick in the air you could taste it.

You shake your head to physically remove the memory from your brain. Your answer is the repeated monotone you find yourself reciting most days. “You protected your men. All of them.” You clear your throat when your voice cracks. “It wasn’t until after it was over, when Aerion yielded from his injuries, that Maekar hit you with his mace whilst trying to get to his son. Hard enough to put you in a coma for a moon’s turn.”

“Of course he did,” Baelor hums with a strange fondness in his voice as he plucks the towel from around his neck, wiping the remnants of shaving cream from his skin. “My brother was always stronger than he realized… Even when we were boys…”

Baelor smiles at you and waits for you to look back at him. You never do.

You just keep dipping your hands into the water, like you’re trying to wipe something from your already clean skin. You’d gained a habit of that since the day you nearly lost Baelor — when you rubbed your hands raw in scalding water because you felt like his blood was still clinging to your skin there, long after it had washed away.

“Forgive me,” he says. “If my words pain you— I mean no offense.”

“Stop that,” you scold, features twisting in offense as your head snaps in the man’s direction. You close the brief distance between you to snatch the towel from his fingers, drying off your hands with a quiet smile. “I know you don’t, Baelor. You’re too kind for any of that.”

You sit gingerly across his thighs and dab diligently at the soapy spots he’d missed on his neck. Your soft lavender scent mixes with the spiced oils he’d bathed in that morning.

Baelor’s mismatched eyes soften with affection as he cradles your waist in a pair of wide, sturdy hands. “If only I could remember… Then you wouldn’t have to carry it all… And I wouldn’t be such a burden to you.”

You flinch, as if his words have found you like a physical blow to the stomach.

“You’re the furthest thing from a burden, my love,” you tell him, stern but no less soft with him. “I wouldn’t want you to remember any of it, anyway. I’ll happily hold the memories for the two of us…”

“You were there, yes?” he wonders then.

You nod wordlessly, not trusting yourself to speak.

“And you saw it?”

“I saw all of it,” you answer, slightly strangled by the burning tears you fight hard to blink away. Your glassy eyes remain on the towel in your grasp, lacking the strength to meet Baelor’s gaze. “I ran to you in the barracks when it was over… I didn’t let go of you for two days— they had to transport both of us to the infirmary together…”

You exhale a sharp exhale through your nose, as if you mean to laugh, though the smile doesn’t quite match the sadness in your eyes.

“Eventually, my body gave out from exhaustion, and Maekar carried me out,” you sigh. “I’m pretty sure I slapped him for it when I woke up, but… That might’ve just been a dream— I’m not sure.”

Baelor’s lip twitches in a faint smile, half-hidden beneath the cloth you press to his cheek. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs beneath it.

“For what?”

“You shouldn’t have had to see that— You shouldn’t have had to see me like that.”

“Perhaps not,” you shrug. “But you’re here now. And you’re getting better every day. And that’s all I really care about now.”

You drop the towel into your lap and cup Baelor’s bearded jaw in your soft palms, brushing the trimmed edges with your thumb. There’s a distinct sort of tenderness in the way you hold him, like you’re savoring the way he feels against you — his coarse scruff in your delicate palms, the warmth beneath his pale skin, the way his chest rises and falls beneath you with even breaths. Alive.

“Any word from my brother?” he asks, the third time that morning.

“Not yet,” you smile. “He was here three days ago to check in on you, remember?”

Baelor’s brown-blue eyes dart back and forth between yours, going glassy as he struggles to recollect the not-so-distant memory. He swallows hard, half-embarrassed, and shakes his head. “I… I think I’m having some trouble remembering…”

“That’s okay,” you tell him, scratching gently at his scruff. “That’s why I’m here. To help you remember.”

“And we’re…” he trails off, brows lowered in curiosity. “We’re married, yes?”

Your smile widens. You nod once, proud and visibly giddy. “We are.”

“You poor thing,” he scoffs a quiet laugh that mixes with your lighter giggling. “What did you do to the Gods to end up cursed with an old man like me?”

“Must’ve been something nice, I’m sure,” you lilt and curl your arms around his shoulders. Your fingers rake through his short grey hair, tracing lightly over the healed wound at the top of his neck, where the base of his skull dips in. “Considering they saved you for me… I wouldn’t exactly call that cursed…”

Your words trail off as the tip of your nose traces the bridge of his. You close the minimal space between you to press a chaste kiss to his mouth. When you pull away, you catch a flicker of something flashing across his face — like he’s seeing you for the very first time.

That was, perhaps, the only good thing to come out of all this, watching Baelor fall in love with you again every day.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” you giggle.

“Have I told you that I love you today?” Baelor wonders, for the hundredth or so time that day.

“You tell me every day, Baelor,” you grin. “But I wouldn’t mind hearing it a few more times…”

You lean in to kiss him again — a longer and more languid thing this time. Baelor exhales a heavy sigh against you that fans across your cupid’s bow. He prays your kiss leaves a mark on him, like hot sealing wax on a love letter. He wants you to mark him with your touch — to burn him, to stamp him, to brand him — so that he’ll have something to remember this moment by, before it’s gone again forever.